Self Love in Writing and Food

Happy Friday, everyone! A whole week since the end of reflections on self-love - time is flying!

I have kept the concept in mind, and have been realizing that there are two especially tricky areas for me. One is doing what I know I need to do, despite being busy or having resistance. The other is finding the balance between taking care of my body's special needs and satisfying my curiosity to try out new things, retry old things, or just feel like I'm joining in some food-related pleasure. The last is maybe the most fraught for me, since I feel some guilt around it too.

not all treats are sweet...

So, I want to talk about these tricky areas today - to show some pitfalls that I've had since I've been away from home, and how to fix them.

Writing


I know, and have said many times, that I feel like I'm actually living my life when I'm regularly working on my poetry, and when I'm not, I feel like I'm just marking time. So, why has it been hard for me to make time here in Oregon? Well, there are reasons. I have a lot of work to do, then there's the work on the farm and all the visiting... I'm often exhausted at the end of the day, which isn't the best state in which to get good writing done.

But I am also lacking a lot of my familiar inspirations. At home, I have probably a dozen books of poetry on the go at any one time - my reading practice is important for my writing practice.

So, to help me, I'm going to share a few of the things that are on my shelf at home:

This is wonderfully sensuous and really is about the heart.

I adore McGrath's use and extension of forms, his humor, his use of incantation, his cynicism.

Limpidly exquisite as always - the latest book of poems by someone I'm honored to call a mentor, who is also the new Alaska Writer Laureate.

An amazing set of poems...

A wonderful anthology about writing poems.

There are many more too, but I don't want to lose anyone! Will share more later. And you'd better believe I'm taking some poetry from online home on this computer when I leave town...

Food


I have a couple of stories of things that didn't work, and some ideas for things that will work better for me.

A few nights ago, Phil and I went out to dinner. We went to an Indian restaurant. I love Indian food, especially the spices, and the ease of finding gluten free and meatless choices. But I was nervous about the fact that they tend to cook in ghee. Although this is clarified butter, it's still a dairy product, and dairy affects my mood in such horrid ways that I'm afraid to eat it. But I want to be able to be flexible enough for the occasional outing - we eat out extremely seldom.

I ordered utthappam, which is basically a sourdough pancake made of rice and lentils with onions and chilis, with some sambar - lentil soup. These are South Indian dishes, where coconut predominates over dairy, so I was hoping that they might not be made with ghee.

Well, it was deliciously spicy, but I could detect an element of dairy in the aftertaste. I only ate half of it, so had some to experiment with the next day. I woke up mucusy, headachy, and in a really bad mood, and tried a bite or two of the leftovers mid-morning for an immediate return of those symptoms. Told me what I needed to know. I think some Indian restaurants nowadays use olive oil or coconut oil, to cater to vegans, so I guess I should look out for those or make my own. Another one for the 'watch' list.

The other 'food' problem area is temptation. I'm away from home, can't make my own treats (although I brought some with me), am often working long hours in town. At the farm, everyone eats tons of sugar and ice cream. In town, there are a few raw bars available that aren't around where I live.

So, I gave into temptation twice over the past week and tried out these new larabar flavors I hadn't had before:

Chocolate chip brownie and peanut butter chocolate chip. First ingredient: dates. Possible milk contamination in the chips. But I love chocolate chip anything and have it so seldom (not supposed to have chocolate either, remember). I didn't eat either of them in one go - they took a couple days each. And the pb one gave me a good idea for an alternative energy bar to make for Phil, but they're really not a good food for me.

It's another piece of the discussion about 'natural' versus 'what works for you.' Dates are more 'natural' and whole than the white stevia powder I use in my home made bars and barks. But when I eat my stevia-sweetened goodies, I feel good and stable. When I ate the larabars with dates, I felt jittery, unsatisfied, with a big increase in appetite and cravings. That's the worst thing to me about eating high-glycemic things: they make me hungrier!

So, what is going to work?

Well, I've shown before the whole bunch of no-sugar cookies I brought with me -

these are disappearing fast.

There's one batch that is _very low_ sugar instead of 'no sugar:' I made a batch of these cinnamon maca bars from Sunfood to bring with me to Oregon. The recipe calls for dates and two tablespoons of honey. I subbed goji berries for the dates, but I did use the two tablespoons of honey: I used some hoarded precious Christmasberry honey from my Hawaii days. Christmasberry honey is supposedly as potent a healer as Manuka honey. (Christmasberry is a noxious weed that is also a potent herb. Also known as Brazilian peppertree.)

It boggles my mind that the recipe says 'makes six bars:' I think I got 18 out of it! So, two tablespoons of healing honey and two tablespoons of (low sugar anyway) goji berries in a batch of 18 is pretty low-sugar for now. And again, these don't send my blood sugar for a loop like the larabars.

I also brought some bark:

I've shared many recipes for bark in the past. Earlier this year, when I was 'very depleted' and not digesting anything, these really were my major source of calories. More recently, I've backed off a lot on them, since I have so many more options and they really are dense. But, since they're so similar in composition to chocolate, especially when I use my dark chocolate flavor extract, they make a pretty good substitute/treat when chocolate is making the rounds.

One more thing I did was to make a chia mix - chia seeds, coconut flour, goji berries, ginger, bee pollen. Mix a couple spoonfuls with some nutmilk and stevia - and, here, some blackberries I gathered a couple days ago:

This is something I hadn't been doing at home, but everything else smack of the familiar.

Finally, if I absolutely have to have chocolate, I will occasionally buy a Lindt 90% bar.
Being 90% cocoa, it's very low sugar obviously, and I find one square (which has 55 calories) to be very satisfying, so long as I am mindful. So a single bar will last for weeks. I try not to do this, because of chocolate's effect on my adrenals, but when we're away from home, and considering that I am generally so very strict, I consider it an slight indulgence that works if I'm careful. On the side of self-love, not self-abuse.

And, not all food treats are sweet! I pictured jicama up top, always a great treat for me. And avocado is another wonderful treat.

What are some non-sweet treats for you?
How do you take care of your muse?

Strange Blogging Locations 1, Recipe Revisits and No-Sugar Mesquite-Flax Cookies

We have a gorgeous blue-sky day here! In fact, after pouring rain all day yesterday, it brightened up in the evening too. Blue sky usually means lots of wind here too, so no boating today! I'm hoping to get a little hike in this afternoon. Our friend John is such a trooper - he's not letting three broken ribs keep him back at all (doctors make their own worst patients!) so we are all keeping an eye out. He's still hoping to go on the short plane ride over the glacier, and maybe dayhiking out there.

Now that I can write my blog at home, it's time to start a little catalogue of the weird and wonderful places I've blogged when that wasn't an option. Stop 1: the laundromat!

I went there yesterday and did five loads of laundry, which was an ordeal - was glad not to be trying to fit my whole day's internet in at the same time! They have laundry, public showers (that cost an arm and a leg but we sometimes indulge in), wi-fi, and a little coffee shop - they must make a killing. We dry our clothes back at home and there is simply not room in our cabin for five loads-worth of laundry! Note to self - do it sooner next time! Everyone and their uncle was in the laundromat yesterday! It was sheeting down rain and I guess all the RV-visitors were there, as well as several of the many Homer-ites like us who have no running water. To add to the chaos, there were about 7 machines out of order, so we were like a pack of vultures in there!

I wanted to revisit a couple recipes I've blogged about here. First up, the No-Sugar Superfood Cookies. The dehydration worked just fine, but I badly need to revise this recipe! I'm eating them, because I hate throwing stuff out, but may not be able to eat them all - there is something very strange about the taste, soapy, almost. My first thought is that I put in way too much orange zest and overpowered it. I'm also thinking that I might have thrown some almond extract into the chia-sweet before having all that orange zest and deciding to make it orange-flavored. Orange and almond flavor are not the best combination! But I'm going to go back and taste those superfood powders too, and see if any one of them has the kind of flavor that would react intensely like that with orange zest. One other thought is that it wasn't an organic orange - not sure what I was thinking, I never usually use the zest off of those… 

Here's a rough-and-ready recipe for the previous batch of no-sugar cookies I made, to make up for it.  I 'winged' it, so quantities are approximate. I mixed together:

1/3 cup coconut oil melted, with 1 teaspoon white stevia

~2 cups shredded coconut

~2 cups flaxseed meal

1/4 cup mesquite meal

cinnamon, ginger, cardamom galore

And then added as much more flaxseed meal as necessary to get them cookie-dough texture. 

These are a little more crumbly than the others, but they are so good - no weird tastes here!

The other 'revisit' is 'bark' (or whatever I should call it). I did a post a little while back with a lot of variations on the theme. Lately, I've been leaving the cacao nibs out always, regretfully (a post on that coming up very soon), but have been tending to add more reishi powder, and will be adding fo-ti and rhodiola now also. And now that I'm chelating, I've also added zeolites (just about a tablespoon per batch) to my latest two batches - mint/algae flavored (pictured left) and almond-sesame-maca (pictured right). 

This is my absolute favorite food that I eat every day - so much so that I'm afraid of them, afraid I'll eat too much! When I was in Fairbanks and ran out, I was so much hungrier, so I must get a fair proportion of my calories from them. Well, they contain little-to-no sugar (depending on whether I've used carob/mesquite/maca at all) and are packed with protein powder, algae, superfoods, coconut oil, so it can't be too bad, right? 

Oh, and another thing I've been adding to some of my 'bark' recipes lately is 'nooch,' aka Nutritional Yeast - it's not 'natural,' it's not raw, but it's really high in protein, fiber, B-vitamins and I happen to love the taste. I'd been avoiding it for months because of the 'yeast' issue - it didn't really make sense to me why inactive nutritional yeast would feed candida, but my philosophy was 'when in doubt, leave it out.' But I spoke with my ND about it and he encouraged me to eat it again, and said that in his opinion, the folks who assert that eating that kind of yeast is detrimental when you have a yeast problem don't have their facts straight.

Speaking of which - yet another revisit! My dressing for marinaded broccoli and cauliflower - I made another last night - about three tablespoons each of tahini and nooch, a shake of smoked paprika, a tablespoon of flax seeds, 1/2c water, a shake of oregano, and a bunch of parsley, cilantro and chives from the garden. This dressing was so delicious to me, it helped me to think of food as something to enjoy and savor, as opposed to a torturous obligation that gives me body-image anxiety!

The final revisit is not a recipe, but a vegetable. 

I've always thought I wasn't much of a fan of peas - we grew a lot of them the last two summers but I really thought they were for Phil and some of our friends. Well, this year I seem to have changed! I've been loving picking a couple peas off as I go past and munching on them! Here's one of our pea tangles - so beautiful…

This photo was taken around 9.30 last night from outside the cabin. Do you see the half moon in the clear sky? It shows you how low the celestial bodies are in our skies.

Much Love.

Back Home! Garden Flourishes, Look What Market Spice Tea Does to Apples!

It's so good to be home! We have guests arriving from Oregon today, so time to turn around and change mode. I'm probably not going to be a big part of festivities with our guests, though, since they are all strapping men and there's not a chance I'll keep up. And I'm very much looking forward to settling back in, 'recombobulating,' tending the garden, and getting back to writing!

First, a strange story. I bought some rooibos Market Spice tea in Anchorage - I love the rich cinnamon/orange zest flavor, and love that they have it with rooibos so that I can enjoy it even though I have to avoid caffeine. I bought it in bulk in a ziploc bag. 

I also bought some organic granny smith apples - impossible to find in Homer this time of year and the ND still wants me to eat apples! Apples and tea went in the same bag, and look what the tea did to the apples! 

At first we thought they must have been frozen and thawed out and discolored, but they smelled really strongly of cinnamon and orange oils - and look, it even discolored the label on the apple!

Fortunately, I discovered this battle and separated the parties before the apples could be trounced any further. They were still edible, with a strong cinnamon/orange flavor, and where the skin was discolored, the flesh was softened.

Good to know, huh? Maybe that's something one could use for a marinade idea. 

Back home, I'd been gone three weeks, and the garden has been loving the rainy summer this year. I was so excited to find this beautiful cauliflower!

And here are carrots and chives with the cauliflower leaves in the foreground. Cauliflower leaves are monstrous! I'm hoping to kraut them.

Here's another cauliflower I just harvested (raspberries in the background are coming on)…

… and some rather funny carrots that I'm not quite so sure about!

Lots more beauties - had some romaine for lunch as well. And although it's definitely autumnal-feeling here now, I think I could get in another crop of lettuce/spinach/other short-season greens before it all gets too cold.

I'm pleased that my energy is as good as it is, but rest is definitely part of the picture for the next few days. But I'm looking forward to getting back to translation work and to writing, and to fooling around in the garden! It's also nice to have my own non-garden foods at hand again. I did make a batch of 'bark' on the road with coconut oil/stevia/a ton of chlorella/maca/shredded coconut/flax meal/spices (lots of cardamom, some ginger).

It was very strong with all the chlorella, but it was good, and I seem to feel better when I have some of that kind of food around. So, nice to have all the other bits that I put in there (reishi powder, spirulina, nut pulp from nut milk, spices, etc) to make a big fresh batch!